Digital health platform company Guidehealth has announced a partnership with Story Health, a digital health company focused on specialty care delivery, to offer health systems and clinically integrated networks a value-based cardiology care program.
Health systems and CINs partnered with Guidehealth can integrate Story Health’s program to support at-risk patients with heart conditions such as heart failure, hypertension, and arrhythmia, with the goal of providing better care while also seeking to reduce the total cost of care.
Dallas-based Guidehealth, which recently acquired the managed services organization (MSO) and value-based care service division of data analytics platform company Arcadia, says it supports physicians by strengthening relationships with affiliated networks, improving financial performance of value-based risk contracts, enabling growth of high-value referrals, and reducing administrative burden.
The company describes its platform as combining virtually embedded “Healthguides” and AI native workflows to bring together predictive data of a patient at the right time to maximize health outcomes and value for physicians and patients alike.
Guidehealth’s Healthguides will identify qualified patients and assist with enrollment into Story Health’s program. Story Health’s specialized clinical care team, enabled by the technology platform, will directly engage patients to get and keep their care on track. Healthguides will ensure providers are kept up to date, and involve them in any care escalations.
“Cardiovascular diseases are among the costliest and deadliest conditions in our healthcare system. Many patients could avoid adverse events that land them in the hospital if they have more frequent care, much of which can be accomplished virtually and asynchronously,” said Story Health Co-founder and President Nita Sommers, in a statement. “We are thrilled to partner with Guidehealth to extend the care PCPs in value-based arrangements can provide to their patients by delivering a new model of direct specialty care.”
“Reducing total costs doesn’t have to come at the expense of delivering high-quality care at scale. Story Health has a proven track record of engaging patients with heart conditions in their health and improving outcomes,” said Guidehealth Co-founder and CEO Sanjay Doddamani, M.D., in a statement. “Adding Story Health to our ecosystem both allows providers to exceed their care quality goals and ensures patients aren’t waiting to receive ongoing care, especially between visits when they may have higher disease burden or complications that can lead to expensive emergency department visits. This innovative approach directly integrates specialized cardiovascular care for high-risk patients with complex care plans, added Doddamani, who is a cardiologist.
Supporting more than 500,000 lives, Guidehealth works with several health systems and CINs nationwide to increase access to care and improve health outcomes under value-based models. The company says it provides a technology platform and clinical support services that integrate directly into primary care workflows, empowering providers to better coordinate care and close care gaps at lower overall costs while reducing administrative burden.
In a February 2024 interview with Healthcare Innovation, Kirk Garratt, M.D., medical director of the Center for Heart & Vascular Health at ChristianaCare, and Story Health CEO Tom Stanis spoke about their collaboration to improve health outcomes for patients living with hypertension and heart failure in Wilmington, Del.
The partnership uses Story Health’s digital hybrid platform that provides patients with a dedicated health coach to ensure their care plan is followed and treatment goals are achieved. Through this approach, ChristianaCare said it has been able to address some health disparities, with a significant improvement in the number of Black patients adhering to prescribed doses of guideline-directed medical therapy for heart failure.
ChristianaCare said Black patients in particular have made remarkable gains:
• 2.6x improvement on target doses of beta blockers (76 percent);
• 2.7x improvement on target doses ACE/ARB/ARNIs (54 percent); and
• 2.2x improvement on target doses of MRAs (57 percent).
ChristianaCare was also able to achieve improvement in Black patients taking SGLT2 inhibitors, rising from a 32 percent baseline to 74 percent.
Garratt said the impetus to get health systems to focus on this work is initially to avoid readmission penalties in government insurance programs, adding that the number of ChristianaCare patients covered by government plans has gradually increased to 66 percent.
Avoiding readmission penalties was the easy target, he said. “That was the low-hanging fruit — getting ahead of those readmission rates. That’s how our model was crafted initially. We identify patients for enrollment in Story Health based on their having an acute hospitalization for heart failure,” Garratt said. “But our conversations now are starting to evolve past that and we’re thinking about not just interfering with readmissions, but interfering with admissions. Can we implement a superior care plan leveraging partners like Story Health to keep people from landing in the hospital in the first place?”
